Monday, 21 May 2012

The ultimate question

I have always been
nonplussed by the subject I teach, Art. I have to to cover content
which is not based on hard evidence at all. I may be rewarded by the
gusto with which students work at tasks I set them, but in the
background lures a monstrous question: “What actually is this
about?” I fear the student who comes up with it, and as a teacher
I would cut a poor figure if I didn't answer. So I do answer. Most of
it is bluff. What I can't have in my class room is the gratuitous
notion “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I mark their works
of art, so at least I must be able to tell them the fundamentals of
Art, to the best of my knowledge and experience.

1 Universal beauty

The American crocodil is a beautiful animal
with special aesthetic preferences
source:http://animals.nationalgeographic.com

Universal beauty does
exist. The aesthetic experience is one of the motors of evolution. At
least all motile creatures prefer configurations of the
environment that match their own constitution and head towards these.
We can see they do so.

So it is not a special feature of mankind, I
believe that the amoeba which moves toward light actually enjoys it.
What we call beauty is the perception of an environment which is
better suited for survival. There is no reason to limit such joy to
the human species. The experience of beauty is in the nose of the
crocodile which smells a rotting corpse. Surely it runs for it.

Our
species has preferences of its own, and these can be augmented and
studied. Making art is a way to do so. It makes you susceptible for
for the way nature hard-wired you. That's why you like to make art. This cannot be evaluated with a
mark. I should not give you a bad mark for your painting when you
happen to be colour-blind, should I? Nor do you deserve a good mark when you just follow an instinct, do you?

To some extent this
universal beauty of the species homo sapiens can be laid out in
prescriptions or rules. These tendencies of our sensory system have
been studied by psychologists and art historians. For example, we
like contrasts in form, so a sure way to draw attention to your work
is exaggerating these contrasts. If you draw a lady, giving her large
boobs will work. I would like to mark that, but unfortunately simply
executing prescriptions won't work as some of these rules are
remarkably contradictory. For example: symmetry is supposed to be beautiful, then why is it so often boring?

By the way, there may
have been a time, when our ancestors walked in the savannah, that
they liked the smell of rotting flesh as well. Those predecessors of
ours were scavengers.

2 Cultural beauty

Paul McCarthy transforms dog's poo into a work of art

We are story tellers.
We can learn from stories. Also we imitate behaviour of clever
members of our tribe and learn from them doing so. That's how we build
culture.

Culture is a massive development in evolution. We are not
the only ones, a tribe of chimps teach each other how to use stones
to crack hard nuts that grow in their forest, other chimps can't do
it, wild dogs teach their youngsters hunting techniques which may
differ per family, and old female elephants teach their daughters
where to find water in their particular environment. But we are the
champions of learning and teaching.

So that's what I do for
a living. I teach you the art of our culture, Western Art, which is based in Europe and has grown into a global thing. I am not versed in
traditional African art at all, that is a wholly different kettle of fish. You
need a lot of knowledge of magic and sorcery to understand traditional African
art. I am good at Western Art, and you are to learn about it. I
can mark your attainment in culture.

To make it even more
complicated: Western Art shows some strands that are quite
incompatible with Universal Beauty. Sometimes I must teach you to
appreciate ugly things! It takes a lot of knowledge about how ugly
things came about to be beautiful to understand this strange
phenomenon. That body of knowledge is called Art History. It is an
amazing story.

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